The present description relates generally to the field of classifying retail products and services, and more specifically to methods of and systems for classifying retail products and services using characteristic-based grouping structures.
Merchants typically classify retail products and services based on one or more attributes of the retail products and services. While all businesses must deal with product variations in some way, the issue is critical in the retail industry. In the retail industry, merchants may classify retail items based on many various color-specific, size-specific, or color-and-size-specific attributes of the items. For example, for color-specific attributes in the fashion retail industry, there may by many thousand different color values and variations (e.g., red, dark red, light red, magenta, pink, etc.) for fashion items. The complexity of organization for the many possible values of a particular attribute may overwhelm the capacity of conventional automated classification systems. Further, individual items or groups of items may require only a limited set from a spectrum of several thousand possible values of a particular attribute in the system, making it difficult to select and assign attributes to the individual item or group of items. There is an ongoing need for improved methods of and systems for classifying retail products and services. Thus, it would be beneficial to provide an automated method of and system for classifying retail products and services that allows users to consolidate the available values and variations of an attribute into manageable groupings by using characteristic-based grouping structures.